UK supermarket Sainsbury's calls time on multi-buy promotions

LONDON, Feb 11 (Reuters) - Sainsbury (Amsterdam: SJ6.AS - news) 's, Britain's second biggest supermarket chain, will phase out multi-buy promotions across its grocery business by August, saying customers no longer appreciate them.

The firm said on Thursday it would instead focus on lower regular prices.

Sainsbury's, along with big four rivals Tesco (Hanover: TCO.HA - news) , Wal-Mart's Asda, and Morrisons, is fighting a price war to stop losing shoppers to German discounters Aldi and Lidl. All the big four have reduced promotions of various sorts to part-finance price cuts.

Industry data published on Tuesday showed Sainsbury's is continuing to show greater resilience to the discounters than its peers.

Sainsbury's said the removal of more than half its multi-buy promotions since March 2015, including on dairy, canned and packaged goods, meat, fish and poultry, had been well received by customers.

By August the commitment will have been extended across its full range of branded and own-brand soft drinks, confectionery, biscuits and crisps.

Sainsbury's said shoppers had complained that multi-buys were often confusing and created storage and waste problems at home. Health campaigners argued they encourage obesity.

Shares (Berlin: DI6.BE - news) in Sainsbury's, which last week agreed a 1.3 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) deal to buy Argos owner Home Retail , were down 1.2 percent at 237.5 pence at 1222 GMT, outperforming a FTSE 100 (NasdaqGS: Z - news) index down 2.2 percent. ($1 = 0.6936 pounds) (Reporting by James Davey; editing by Adrian Croft)